Francis Bacon,
Philosopher of Industrial Science. 1949.The Philosophy of Francis Bacon. 1964.
includes translations of Bacon's The Masculine Birth
of Time,Thoughts and Conclusions, The Refutation
of Philosophies

" Evermore, it must be remembered that the least part of
knowledge is subject to the use for which God hath granted it,
which is the benefit and relief of the state and society of
man."Francis Bacon

_______

I need a sympathetic audience this evening,
for the subject of my lecture is far above my powers. I have not, for
instance, felt theologian enough to discuss his Confession of
Faith. It is however a subject that imposes itself, as I found
when I first attempted to write about Francis Bacon as a scientist
some dozen years ago. Then it became clear to me, not simply that
Bacon was a Christian, but that his Christianity was vital to the
understanding of his philosophy of science. Plenty of scientists
have, of course, been Christians. But the fact that Napier used his
logarithms to solve problems concerning the Number of the Beast, or
that Boyle was an ardent evangelist, or that Faraday was a
Sandemanian or Mendel a Roman Catholic, does not assist our
understanding of their contributions to mathematics, chemistry,
electricity, or the laws of inheritance. But unless we give Bacon's
Christianity a central place in our interpretation of his thought we
must be for ever content to skirt round the edges of it. So here I am
under the auspices of the New Atlantis Foundation to talk about the
author of The New Atlantis, trusting that this happy
coincidence will ensure me an indulgent hearing.
I shall need it. For I shall make bold to say at the outset that, to
the best of my judgment, Bacon intended a reform of religion just as
much as reform of science. Or, to be more precise, that he did not
separate the two. For while it is a fact that he laboured to
distinguish the realms of faith and knowledge, it is equally true
that he thought one without the other useless. Edwin Abbott, an
unsympathetic but competent biographer, long ago noted the religious
character of Bacon's physics. It is a shrewd observation, and
I should like to put you a simple question. Are the Fathers of
Solomon's House in The New Atlantis priests or scientists, or
both? Is the House itself a temple of or a research institute? Was it
not the most natural thing in the world that the first historian of
the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, in acknowledging Francis Bacon as
the inspirer of the whole enterprise, should go on to ask, "If our
Church should be an enemy to commerce, intelligence, discovery,
navigation, or any sort of mechanics, how could it be fit for the
present genius of this nation?

The Bishop's question was a most pertinent one. He
was conscious of a change in the spiritual climate of England. He
talks of "the present genius of this nation" and is fully conscious
of the role Bacon had played in forming it. England is to go forward
with a scientific and technological revolution, and the Church is to
play an active role in it. Listen to him again.

"The univeral disposition of this age is bent upon a
rational religion; and therefore I renew my affectionate request
that the Church of England would provide to have the chief share
in its first adventures; that it would persist, as it has begun,
to encourage experiments, which will be to our Church as the
British Oak is to our empire, an ornament and a defence to the
soil wherein it is planted."

Nor is that all. Experimental science, the Bishop
claims, will overcome narrowness of mind; enable minds distracted by
civil and religious differences to meet calmly on nuetral ground;
and, by contriving a

All these, he claims, have "calmly conspired in a
mutual agreement of labours and desires." Such was the temper of
England in the first spring of the Baconian revolution. When Boyle
was simultaneously laying the foundations of modern chemistry and
expending vast effort and vast sums on the dissemination of the
Scriptures in many tongues. When Christopher Wren combined the
building of churches with original contributiions to ten or a dozen
nascent branches of natural science. The Baconian revolution, one
might say, seemed a further installment of the Reformation.
At the appearance of Bacon's masterwork The Great Instauration
in 1620, George Herbert, a personal friend of his, who knew his
thought well, with his usual justness and perception and precision of
speech, hailed the author in a Latin poem as

Mundique et animarum sacerdos
unicus,

the alone-only priest of nature and men's souls.

On the foundation of the Royal Society, the
inspired Cowley was voicing a common sentiment when he wrote
:

From these and all along errors of the way
in which our wandering predessors went,
And like th' old Hebrews many years did stray|
In deserts but of small extent
Bacon , like Moses, led us forth at last.
The barren wilderness he past,
Did on the very border stand
Of the blest promis'd land,
And from the mountain's top of his exalted wit,
Saw it himself and shew'd us it.

The truth is that Francis Bacon envisaged himself
and was, after his death, for a while accepted as leader of a total
revolution in the conditions of life; and that this revolution
consisted in the recovery by mankind of his true relation towards the
world of nature; namely in the Dominion over the Universe which had
been promised to Adam before the Fall. Hence the aptness of the
comparison with Moses ; hence the justification for calling him the
priest of nature and mankind.

A rough and ready way to bear out these claims is
to make a cursory examination of The New Atlantis. You
remember the story. A ship has been driven off course in the Pacific
and, when supplies begin to run out and there are many sick on board,
the crew sight an island, which, as they later discover, bears the
Hebrew name of Bensalem, Son of Peace. This island utopia turns out
to be very much a home from home. Its customs are not unfamiliar to
the new arrivals; they are simply better. In James Spedding's happy
phrase Bensalem is

"simply our own world as it might be made if we did our
duty by it."

A boat puts out from shore to contact the ship and
brings a document couched in four languages-ancient Hebrew, ancient
Greek, good Latin of the School, and contemporary Spanish. The
culture of the island, therefore, is not different from that of
England; nor is its religion. For the scroll is stamped with the sign
of the cross, which is taken as a certain presage of good. "God is
manifested in this land" they exclaim soon after they come ashore.
"We are come here among a Christian people full of piety and
humanity." Of the first important official they meet they enquire who
was the apostle of the island. "Ye knit my heart to you," he
cries, "by asking this question in the first place; for it showed
that you seek first the kingdom of heaven." He then explains the
miraculous circumstances in which, not long after the Ascension, the
islanders became possessed of a small ark of cedar wood containing
all the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. For in
Bensalem, as in Bacon's ideal for England, the Bible is the treasure,
the Church only the ark that contains it. There is a Hebrew element
in the population living in great mutual amity and respect with their
neighbors-a point of some curiosity, since the Jews had been expelled
from England in the XIII century and not allowed re-entry till after
Bacon's time. It is owing to their presence that scientific works of
Solomon, lost to Europe, have survived in Bensalem. The central
instituition of the island, though its main business is science and
technology, is called Solomon's House, or The College of the Six Days
Works. Its chiefs are designated Fathers, and their spokesman
explains :

"We have certain hyms and services we say daily, of laud
and thanks to God for his marvellous works; and forms of prayer
imploring his aid and blessing for the illumination of our
labours, and the turning of them into good and holy uses."

Such is the setting Bacon provides for his
brilliant sketch of the scientific wonders of Bensalem, which so
strikingly anticipate the achievements of the last three centuries.
Bacon was probably about fifty years of age when he composed it. May
we take it that it represents, in its deeply religious and
consistently Biblical colouring, a permanent and life-long
charateristic of his thought?
This is certainly so. Bacon wa already Lord Chancellor of England and
fifty-nine years of age before he published his Great
Instauration. By the title, as he explains more than once, he
indicated his intention of instructing mankind to overcome, so far as
might prove possible, the consequences of the Fall and to merit the
long delayed fulfilment of God's promise to Adam of dominion over the
universe.

"Man by the Fall fell at the same time from the state of
innocence adn from his dominion over creation. Both of these
losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired;
the former by religion and Faith, the latter by arts and sciences.
For creation was not by th curse made altogether and forever a
rebel, but in virute of that covenant 'In the sweat of thy face
thou shalt eat bread' it is now by various (labours) at length,
and in some measure subdued to the supplying of man with bread :
That is to the uses of human life" (Novum Organum II,
end)

It is true that many students of Bacon's thought
take this,and the many similar pronouncements which adorn the pages
of the The Great Instauration, as insincere. Joseph de Maistre
regarded it as a heavy disguise of orthodoxy laid on to conceal his
real atheism and materialism from the prying eyes of James. Professor
Broad, the exponent of a more moderate scepticism, says,

" It is evident that he was a sincere if
unenthusiastic Christian of that sensible school which regards the
Church of England as a branch of the civil service and the
Archbishop of Canterbury as the British Minsiter for Divine
Affairs."

But it may be that Professor Broad's tolerant
flippancy is even further from the truth thatnt he angry hostility of
de Maistre. The fact is that Bacon was a man with a mission. He was
still but a boy, according to what he later told his secretary and
literary executor, Dr. Rawley, when he became impatient of all
philosophy that was strong only in disputations and contentions and
barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man.
In which mind, adds Rawley, he continued till his dying day.
Here, as it seems to me, it is all important to consider what Bacon
meant by a philosophy productive of works for the benefit of the life
of man. It we take it to mean, as most of his commentators seem to
do, that what he had in mind was the mere multiplication of comforts
and commodities, then it becomes impossible to understand the passion
with which Bacon , throughout his life, pursued so trivial an
ambition.

It becomes impossible to understand why he should
solemly pronounce it his "only earthly wish." But that this is not
the sense in which Bacon intended the words is beyond dispute. I have
mentioned the prayers that were in use in Solomon's house in The
New Atlantis. Here is the beginning of the prayer that Bacon
composed for use in scientific institutes such as he tried all his
life to get set up in England.

"To God the Father, God the Word, God the Spirit, we pour
out our humble and burning prayers, that mindful of the miseries
of the human race and this our mortal pilgrimage in which we wear
out evil days and few, he would send down upon us ne streams from
the fountain of his mercy for the relief of our distress."

And to the prospective student, the reluctant
neophyte being initiated into the new philosophy of works, the
promises he holds out are these :

"My dear, dear boy," he says, '"that which I
purpose is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy,
and legal wedlock; form which association you will secure an
increase beyond all the hopes and prayers of ordinary marriages,
to wit, a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen who will overcome
the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race, which
are the source of more destruction than all giants, monsters, or
tyrants, and will make you peaceful, happy, prosperous, and
secure."

It is only when we take the philosophy of works in
this universal and philanthropic sense that we can begin to
understand how it has for Bacon religious significance.
The words I have just quoted come from the writing called The
Masculine Birth of Time. This title is eloquent of the belief
which animates all Bacon's writings; that he was destined to be the
herald of unimaginable change in the fortunes of the human race. The
words quoted were written in 1603, when Bacon was forty-two.
Seventeen years later he expressed the same thought in still stronger
terms.

" The sixth part of my work,"

he says in The Great Instauration,

" for which the rest are but a preparation, will reveal
the philosophy which is the product of that legitimate, chaste,
and severe mode of enquiry which I have taught and prepared. But
to pefect this last part is a thing both above my strength and
beyond my expectation. What I have been able to do is to give it,
as I hope, a not contemptible start. The destiny of the human race
will supply the issue, and that issue will perhaps be such as men
in the present state of their fortunes and of their understandings
cannot easily grasp or measure. For what is at stake is not merely
a mental satisfaction but the very reality of man's well-being and
all his power of action."

To interpret his thought in historical terms and
express it more concretely, Bacon had observed that while antiquity
had not failed to create a whole encyclopedia of the sciences (the
word is Greek and was in use in the sense in which we employ it
already in the second century before Christ) those sciences were of
such a kind as to give mankind little control over nature, little
power of action. They were barren of works for the benefit of the
life of man. For Bacon this was not simply a problem of the state of
learning. When he wrote cautiously he so desribed it, being well
aware of the obstacles which would confront him if he disclosed the
full depth of his thought. But for Bacon the real problem was not an
academic one. It was a problem of life and death. He took the same
view of the situation in England in his own day as the more serious
scientists do in our day of the situation in the world, and felt the
same desperation. We have associations for the advancement of science
just as Bacon wrote books in support of the advancement of learning.
But we still lack an association for the liquidation of world
poverty. It is respectable to hoist the academic banner, not so
respectable then or now to point to the "immeasurable helplessness
and poverty of the human race." But we shall not begin to
understand Bacon until we take him at his word and accept his
protestation that to overcome poverty was the primary business of
science. In that sense he called it his only earthly
wish.

In England, as the historian of philanthropy
(Philanthropy of England, 1480-1660 by W.K. Jordan,
p.57) tell us,

" the sixteenth century was deeply concerned with the
problem of poverty; its literature and documents are filled with
the question; its discussion of causes, of extent, andof methods
of action mount as the century wears on."

Like other public men Francis Bacon was deeply
involved. When the Parliament of 1597 discussed the whole problem of
poverty and its relief he spoke of the blighting effect of the
enclosures and was subsequently one of the members of the commision
appointed to sort out the tangle of remedial legislation proposed in
some ten or dozen different bills. But Bacon, though fully apprised
of the nature of the problem, was not satisfied with the remedies
proposed. The beginning of the century had seen More's wistful but
dubious glance at the solution of poverty proposed by the spokesman
in his Utopia- the solution of an equal distribution of property.
This had no appeal for Bacon. Neither did the actual course which
charity took wholly satisfy him. W.K. Jordan, the historian of this
remarkable movement, the beneficial effects of which are with us
still, being knit into the very foundations of the social life of
England, has revealed by a patient examination of the testamentary
dispositions of the age what a vast volume of private wealth was
poured by the merchants and industrialists who made fortunes at this
time into carefully planned and well endowed charitable trusts. But
just as Bacon had seen no solution of the problem of poverty in
Thomas More's egalitarianism- which was only fair shares in poverty
and not the creation of plenty- so also he disliked that form of
society in which a few individuals make vast fortunes in the midst of
widespread poverty and seek to redress the balance at the end of
their lives by the distribution of what, soberly speaking, is no
longer even theirs, since, as everybody knows, you can't take it with
you.

The solution in which Bacon believed depended
first on the structure of society itself. It must not breed poverty
and riches at opposite poles and delude itself with the fancy that
men who have spent their lives inth amassing of private gain will on
their deathbeds have such a wise understanding of public needs that
they can be safely entrusted with the creation of of permanent
institutions for dealing with them. Instead he tried to turn the eyes
of his fellow countrymen the example presented by tlhe Low
Countries,

"who could never have endured and continued so
inestimable and insupportable charges, either by their natural
frugality or by their mechanical industry, were it not also that
their wealth was dispersed in many hands, and not ingrossed in
few; and those hands not so much of the nobility, but most and
generally of inferior conditions." (The True Greatness of the
Kingdom of Britain)

That was one requirement. The other was, of
course, the creation of of a new kind of science, which unlike the
encyclopedia of sciences inherited from the Greeks, should be
constructed from the foundation up to be a means of producing works
for the benefit of the life of man. Such were Bacon's two
requirements, nor were they unconnected with one another. Both the
new society, in which wealth would be more equally distributed, and
the new science in which knowledge would be power, must, he was
convinced, rest upon a revaluation of the role of the mechanical arts
in the development of civilisation. The mechanical arts were innocent
of theory and of but limited efficacy, and yet it was entirely due to
them that, in the small measure to which they were effective, nature
had by various labours been subdued to the supplying of man with
bread. If a science of works was to be created, the mechanical arts
must provide the foundation.
If only when we place ourselves at this view point, when we bear in
mind both the problem of poverty and the nature of the remedies Bacon
had in mind, that we can begin to discuss the religious character of
his thought. The plague of Baconian scholarship has been that his
commentators, with few exceptions, try to fit his philosophy into a
category too narrow to contain it. Thus, his philosophy of works,
which ought to be accorded a major place in the philosophy of
history, is often cut about and cruelly mangled in order to make it
fit into the history of smaller movements of thought, and the man
who, in Albert Schweitzer's phrase, "drafted the programme of the
modern world view," has become merely one of the contributers to
inductive logic,or to the growth of rationalism, or the history of
English Erastianism or something of the sort.

For my part I propose to take him at his face value as he presents
himself to his readers. That is to say, he was a man whom the
circumstances of his age presented with the problem of poverty; who
saw the solution of that problem in elevating to the dignity and
power of a theroretical science the craft knowledge implicit in the
mechanical arts, who found the traditional philosophy derived from
the Greeks of no avail for two great reasons, one moral and the other
intellectual; and who consequently turned his back upon the Greeks
and discovered for himself in the Bible a world outlook and a
morality on which he could base his new philosophy of works.
This new world-outlook is succintly defined in the twelve brief
Sacred Meditations which Bacon brought out in 1597 as his
first publication together with the more familiar Essays. The
religious thought of these meditations is strongly marked by the
practical morality which had increasingly characterised English
thought from the days of Colet and Erasmus. The first meditation is
no more than one hundred words in length. The gist of it lies in
these words,

"God saw the works of his hands and they were
exceeedingly good; when man turned to consider the works of his
hands, behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit. Whereof if
you will do God's works your sweat will be like aromatic balm and
your rest like the Sabbath of God; for you will work in the sweat
of a good conscience and rest in the leisure of sweet
contemplation."

The significance of these words for Bacon is in
inverse proportion to their length. By recalling the fact that God
had not only created the world but seen that it was good, he rejected
the long tradition of contempt for this world which had come down
from the Orphics through Plato and neo-Platonists, the gnostics and
the mystics, the pseudo-Dionysus and the Florentine platonists, and
was still active in his own day. That early Baconian, the poet John
Milton, echoes his thought when he says (or makes his Satan
say) :

O Earth, how like to heaven, if not preferr'd
More justly, Seat worthier of God's, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old;
For what God after better worse would build?

Furthermore, if Nature is God's handiwork, there
can be no study more pleasing to him than natural philosophy.
On one condition, however- which is the subject of the second
meditation,on the mircacles of the Saviour. God the Father made the
world good, but the works of man's hands are vanity and vexation of
spirit. For this there is only one remedy, that every action should
be motivated by love. This was not clear until the appearance on
earth of God the Word. In Old Testament days the prophets brought all
sorts of calamities on their enemies, which even the Apostles
imitated, Peter striking Ananias dead and Paul making Elymas
blind.
Not so for Jesus. He never performed a miracle except upon the human
body and that for the purpose of healing it.

"He restored motion to the lame, light to the blind,
speech to the dumb, health to the sick, cleanness to the lepers,
sound mind to them that were possessed with devils, life to the
dead. There was no miracle of judgment, but all of mercy, and all
upon the human body."

The third meditation could hardly be more
pertinent to the actual role Bacon had designed for himself. It is on
The Innocence of the Dove and the Wisdom of the Serpent, and it
considers the case of a man who aspires, not to a solitary and
private goodness, but to a fructifying and begetting good involving
the lives of others. The business of such a man will be with the
world; and, though his purpose may be as innocent as the dove, it
will be necessary for him to show himself acquainted with the
cynicism and villainy of the world or risk being taken for a pious
simpleton. He must arm himself with the wisdom of the serpent, but
need not on that account fear pollution any more than a sunbeam which
shines into a privy.
The meditation that deals with hypocrites has again the same
practical ends in view. Hypocrites make a display of public worship,
which costs them nothing. They are exposed when directed towards
works of mercy, reminded that pure religion and undefiled is to visit
the widows and orphans in their affliction, and asked how a man who
does not love his brother whom he hath seen can love God whom he has
not seen.
Religious literature is the subject of another meditation which deals
with three types of imposture. The first consists of the tedious
trivialities of the Schoolmen, who create a specious appearance of
system by the use of technical terms, the piling up of distinctions,
the propounding of these, and arguments pro and con. Then there are
the lives of the fathers and the compositions of ancient heretics in
which the poetic fancy is given free reign to invent every kind of
example that could appeal to men's minds. Finally there are the
mysterious and magniloquent writings, filled with allegories and
allusions, of mystical and gnostic heretics. the first is a trap, the
second a bait, the third a riddle, and all mislead. The remedy lies
int he study of the Bible and of nature. The Scriptures reveal the
will of God, Nature reveals the power of God. Bible reading and
natural philosophy are the cures respectively for superstition and
atheism. The Bible and Nature are God's two books.
These brief meditations, I am well aware, could easily appear nothing
more than a jejune and perfunctory set of typical seventeenth century
commonplaces. But that, I am sure would be to mistake their
significance. Bacon shared with this age the predilection for the
Bible as the true guide to religion and morality. But his conviction
of the necessity and desirability of a scientific and technological
revolution was peculiar to himself and the special purpose of the
meditations was to supply a Biblical inspiration and justification
for this revolution. It would be easy, even tempting, to dismiss this
as a mere policy; to imagine that Bacon did not genuinely owe any of
the inspiration which prompted his reform to Biblical sources, but
pretended to do so in order to win acceptance for his proposals. Is
this the truth? Let us consider the facts.

That the sciences current in his own day had come
down from the Greeks Bacon knew and acknowledged. His complaint was
that while intellectually brilliant and beautifully articulated in
their logical structure they were practically useless. Fertile in
arguments, barren of arts. Beneath this strange paradox he detected
an attitude to nature, and a relation between man and nature, which
he could not accept. Such arts as were known to the Greeks were
regarded by them as imitations of nature. All that man could do, or
ever expect to do, was to learn some of nature's tricks and copy
them, perhaps slight modifications and adjustments to suit himself. A
radical transformation of nature was out of the question. But Bacon
saw things differently. He aimed, in his own words , "to shake nature
in her foundations," and the justificaton for this ambition he found
in the Bible. God, who created nature, made man in ; his own image.
Man must therefore be a creator. Not a child of nature but a lord of
nature. And this, precisely, was what God , according to the
Scriptures, had designed man to be. He as to exercise dominion over
nature. True, this could only be done by studying nature. To conquer
nature one must obey her. But that need not mean that man's ambitions
must be limited to reproducing nature's work's. The esential
character of an artificial thing is that it is not natural. It is
something that could not have existed without the art and agency of
man. The history of the mechanical arts, limited as their achievement
has been, has yet shown that man can create something that would not
have existed without him. This is the process that must be carried
forward. If man is to solve his problems of poverty and disease it
can only be the creation of new arts. Not merely improved arts, but
radically new arts, examples of which, though they be too few, yet
exist in history. Over the mantlepiece in his father's home Francis
Bacon read the words in which Lucretius describes the transition from
a food-gathering to a food-producing stage.

"In days of od Athens, of glorious memory, spread among
the hungry tribes of men knowledge of grain-bearing crops and
thereby fashioned for them a new life."

What was to prevent the industrial revolution, the
evidence of which was everywhere to be observed in Francis Bacon's
England, from effecting a similar revolution in the life of the
modern world? Was this not what God had promised Adam when he
promised him dominion over the rest of creation? That Bacon
believed so I cannot doubt, and for this reason, from 1603 to 1620,
when he drafted and re-drafted his statement of his plan, the
approved title was always The Great Instauration of the Dominion
of Man over the Universe.

But why had the Greeks with all their brilliance
failed? Why did it seem hopeless to expect that the modern world, so
long as it was content to follow in the footsteps of the Greeks,
could ever escape the same futility? This question also the
Bible answered. The failure was a moral oneintellectual pride.
Through intellectual pride philosophy had failed in two ways. Lacking
the patience and humility to piece together the image of the
unviverse by faithful study of Nature, one of God's books,
philosophers, both ancient Greek and modern Italian make empty
logical contructions which are but superficial pictures of reality.
With these, men find it possible to remain satisfied, only because
they ignore the lesson of the Bible, that the prime function of
knowledge is to serve mankind. What more reasonable, then, that
God should smite this presumptuous and uncharitable wisdom with
barrenness?
Here is the account o fhte matter in Bacon's own words :

"Without doubt we are paying for the sin of our first
parents and imitating it. They wanted to be like Gods; we their
posterity, still more so. We create worlds. We prescribe laws to
nature and lord it over her. We want to have all things as suits
our fatuity, not as fits the Divine Wisdom, not as they are found
in nature. We impose the seal of our image on the creatures and
works of God, we do not diligently seek to discover the seal of
God on things. Therefore not undeservedly have we again fallen
from our dominion over the creation; and though after the Fall of
mans some dominion over rebellious nature still remainedto
the extent at least that it could be subdued and controlled by
true and solid artseven that we have for the most part
forfeited by our pride, because we wanted to be like gods and
follow the dictates of our own reason. Wherefore, if there by any
humility towards the Creator, if there be any reverence and praise
of his works; if there be any charity towards men, and zeal to
lessen human wants and sufferings; it there be any love of truth
in natural things, any hatred of darkness, any desire to purify
the understanding; men are to be entreated again and again that
they should dismiss for a while or at least put aside those
inconstant and preposterous philosophies which prefer these to
hypotheses, have led experience captive, and triumphed over the
works of God; that they should humbly and with a certain reverence
draw near to the book of Creation; that there should make a stay,
that on it they should meditate, and that then washed and clean
they should in chastity and integrity turn them from opinion. This
is that speech and language which has gone out to all the ends of
the earth, and has not suffered the confusion of Babel; this must
men learn, and resuming their youth, they must become as little
children and deign to take its alphabet into their hands.
(History of the Winds, 1623)

This extraordinary burst of eloquence, which has
suffered at my hands in being translated from its original Latin, was
written in 1623, when Bacon was sixty-two years of age, after his
disgrace and fall from power, when he was trying to crowd into the
remaining years of his life the scientific labours whihc he had
neglected during his years of political servitude. He had already
written his Last Will and Testament in which he bequeathed his soul
to God above, his body to be buried obscurely, and his name to the
next of ages and foreign nations. Twenty-seven strenous years had
gone by since he had composed his Sacred Meditations, butthe
thoughts remain the same. Only the conviction is stronger, the vision
clearer, the accents more prophetic. Finally and this is the point at
whihc I am trying to arrive, the ideal of science here presented is
unlike anything derived from the Greek tradition. It is less
metaphysical, less ideal, less logical, less intellectual. It is
more religious, more practical, more experimental, more ethical. It
is not pure science, but science understood as a means of worshipping
God and serving mankind. Or to put the matter in another way, it
is a development of Biblical thought and not of Greek. It is, not
merely in expression but in substance, Christian, and
post-Reformation Christian at that. And it is this the neglect of
this character of Bacon's thought that has made the accounts of his
contribution given by historians of science so unsatisfactory. The
usual fate of historians when faced with the problem of Bacon's place
in the history of science is to find themselves reduced to the
conclusion that he really contributed nothing except his eloquence.
In fact he contributed a new conception of the role of science which
has been, and still may be, of great consequence for
mankind.

It is a curious reflection that when we utter the
word ATHENS it is for us a symbol of th past whereas the word
JERUSALEM is a symbol of the future. We look back to the Glory that
was Greece, but we think of building Jerusalem. Athens is a memory
Jerusalem an aspiration. Out of compliment to Athens we go to school
in academies or lyceums, but who could imagine a popular gathering
singing about building Athens in England's green and pleasant land?
The origin of this distincion lies far back in time. But with the
rise of vernacular translations of the Bible it began to be of
fundamental importance for the culture of the English people; and
from the time of Colet onward the resentment at Aristotle's being
allowed to usurp the seat of St. Paul became more and more vocal. To
this mounting tide of feeling Francis Bacon gave a new twist. It had
been a theological issue for some generations, though not for that
reason devoid of significance for the growth of the national
character. Bacon extended it to cover the whole field of learning,
insisting that what St. Paul called "science falsely so called"
was not merely an obstacle to the religious life of the nation, but
an effectual bar to her material progress as well.

"This philosophy,"

he writes,

with regard to the Greek tradition as still taught in the
universities in his day, "this philosophy, if it be carefully
examined, will be found to advance certain points of view which
are deliberately designed to convince men that nothing really
great, nothing by which nature can be commanded and subdued, is to
be expected from human art and human labour. Such teachings, if
they be justly appraised, will be found to tend to nothing less
than a wicked effort to curtail human power over nature and to
produce a deliberate and artificial despair. This despair in its
turn confounds the promptings of hope, cuts the springs and sinews
of industry, and makes men unwilling to put anything to the hazard
of trial."

These, which were not idle words but words born of
much bitter experience, were first penned in Thoughts and
Conclusions in 1607, repeated in the Novum Organum in
1620, and begain to have effect with the foundation of the Royal
Society. In the context of Bacon's writings they were a manifesto in
favour of the industrial expansion of England, with Greek philosophy
appearing in the role of villain and the Bible in the role of
liberator. Thus it was that Bacon did not, could not, choose the
Academy or the Lyceum as his symbol when he sought to liquidate
poverty in England by the application of science to industry. If
England was to be transformed into Bensalem it could only be under
the auspices of Solomon's House.

I have already referred to the Sacred
Meditation on three kinds of imposture in writing. It was a
warning against Scholasticism, that is against letting the quibbling
Aristotelian logic of the Schools usurp the spirituality of
St. Paul. It was a warning against the element of pious fable in
church history and in the lives of the saints. It was a warning
against mystical works like the Celestial Hierarchy of the
pseudo-Dionysus. If it means little to us, that is because the three
types of literature here condemned, went rapidly out of favour. In
the fifty or sixty years after 1600 England passed from a mainly
medieval to a mainly modern outlook on the world, the chief agents in
the change being the two causes championed by Baconthe Bible
and the new philosophy of nature.
But apart from the literature of imposture countenanced by the Church
and indeed fostered by it and nurtured in its bosom, there were two
other contemporary types of imposture against which a genuine
philosophy of nature had to wage victorious struggle if it were to
prevail. These were alchemy and magic. Both these powerful movements
had roots going far back into pagan antiquity, and, what is more they
had, in Bacon's view, certain claims to consideration which the
Church lacked. The Church, in its pre-occupation with the affairs of
the next world, had neglected the affairs of this. Not so the
magicians and the alchemists. They had kept alive a dream, expelled
from the bosum of the church, that it might be possible to make some
other use of a knowledge of nature than St. Augustine allowed. For
St. Augustine the justification of natural philosophy was that it
might be of help for the understanding of the Bible. Francis Bacon
had sharply departed from him on this point, advancing instead his
view that God was the author of two books, not one; and that while
the Bible was indispensible for the knowledge of God's will, it was
from God's other book, Nature, that we could learn to understand his
power. In this stand Bacon was much closer to the alchemists and the
magicians than to the orthodox view, for they had always kept alive
the dream that it might be possible, by acquiring knowledge of
Nature, to effect great and dramatic alterations in man's state.
Historically speaking it would be true to say that alchemy and magic
had drained off from the tradition of Greek science those elements in
it which aimed at controlling nature, leaving to the orthodox
tradition the barren satisfaction of contemplation. In short the
alchemists and magicians kept alive the concept of knowledge as
power, and Bacon did no more than borrow if from them. Hence the many
traces of alchemical and magical thought in Bacon's writings, which
made him in a certain sense the heir of his thirteenth century
name-sake Roger, who had strugggled in his own day to have the
concept of knowledge as power openly accepted and approved by the
church.
Nevertheless Bacon was throughout his whole life the sworn foe of the
alchemists and magicians. And again his condemnation of them is more
than intellectual. When he keeps speaking throughout his writings of
his method of science as being chaste , holy, legitimate and so
forth, the explanation of this somewhat surprising terminology is his
detestation of the moral and spiriutual atmosphere which hung about
the practice of these two professions. He condemned them because,
though they believed in knowledge as power they did not set before
them the great public goal of the relief of man's estate. Instead
they sought possession of certain secret processes which would put
power into their own hands. He condemned them because their writings
were deliberately engimatic and obscure. He condemned them because of
their pretence that the kind of knowledge they sought could only be
attained by a limited number of persons who happened to be endowed
with more than natural powers. He condemned them beacause, working
under these conditions, their results were in fact meagre, while
their boasts were as magnificient as they were unjustified.

Looking at his achievement from the strictly scientific point of view
some ofthe more perceptive ofthe modern historians, Zilsel and
Needham , for instance, agree in recognising Bacon as

"the first writer in the history of mankind to realise
fully the basic importance of modern scientific research for the
advancement of human civilisation."

This is true and finely said. But it is necessary
also to insist that his greatness lies, not in the inductive process
he made an abortive attempt to describe in his Novum Organum,
but in his conception of the true goal of science, the spirit in
which it must be undertaken, and the manner in which it must be
organised. Its goal must be, at least until this object has been
attained, the relief of man's estate. The spirit in which it is
pursued must be humble, sincere, unpretentious. The organisation must
be public, democratic, and co-operative.

It was characteristic of the England of the
seventeenth century that in one department after another of life and
thought the ecclesisastical gave place to the secular. In
descriptions of this process the terminology preferred is often to
say that the religious gave place to the secular. This is
unfortunate. Religion is not much good unless it is as closely
identified with the secular as two faces of a coin. Jerusalem is no
good unless we try to build it in England's green and pleasant land.
For this reason I have found it impossible to give a full account of
what Bacon was after without including it in the history of religion
as well as in the history of science. Of course some of his opinions
about the Bible are as out of date as are so many of his explanations
of natural phenomena, his astronomy, cosmology, anthropology, or what
not. But if the true description of any religion is to be found
not simply in its starting point but in its history, then Baconianism
is a chapter in the history of Christianity. And, while its
scientific significance is obvious, it has also an inescapable
religious significance. Bacon called the fulfilment of his programme
his "only earthly wish" thereby keeping the door open for the
conviction, which he certaintly held, that there is more to us than
what is seen to happen between the cradle and the grave. Furthermore,
like so many modern scientists, he found it impossible to derive the
moral ideals he served from the natural science he was trying to
create. He therefore accepted the law of love as a revelation, a
mystery beyond the reach of human reason. In short, he was, as his
private secretary asserts, and as his friendships and his writings
proclaim, a religious man. What I have tried to do is show how his
Christianity is knit into the very substance of his philosophy, and I
would venture to suggest that it is one of the most original and
fruitful developments of Christianity of which we have any
record. It is also, to my way of thinking, so wise and so
tolerant, so set to avoid theological disputes and be judged only by
its fruits, that it can, does, and will continue to enter into that
slow spiritual process by which the human race, if it survives, will
evolve for itselfwhat does not yet existgenuine world
religion. The goal of such a religion might well be described in
Spedding's phrase

"Our world as it might be made if we did our duty by it."

Bacon is generally misjudged as one concerned only
with the know-how of this processthat is as a scientist. But he
was at least as much concerned to reveal it as a duty. This lies
outside the purview of science and gives his thought its religious
character.